Gutter Investigation
Thanks for the comments. We bought the oversized gutters and downspouts for our house. When we decided to do the oversized gutters, I chose them so the numerous trees would take longer to clog the bigger gutters with debris than it would to clog up smaller gutters. I wasn't really considering the water volume capacity but am now really glad we chose the bigger gutters. If I had it to do over again, I would put a downspout at each end of the problem gutter instead having just one downspout. We still have the option to do so. I'm just not thrilled about having to install another underground drain pipe.
Hey....easy troubleshooting idea. Remove the cap on your cleanout during the next big rain. If the water starts to flow out of the cleanout that would indicate a problem downstream past the cleanout.
I did as 955Lincoln suggested and removed the cleanout cap. While I was not home, we got another heavy rain that overflowed the gutter. Unfortunately, my wife could not tell for certain if water was coming out of the cleanout while looking from the basement porch. She was unwilling to slosh through the mud in the downpour to check out the cleanout up close. She doesn't think water was coming out of the cleanout but is not certain.
Yesterday after work I decided to inspect our gutter system at the part of the house where rainwater overflowed the gutter. I have two snakes. The first snake is a 100 ft (I think) flat snake. It works well for long distances but is not greate at handling complex turns in pipes. The second snake is 25' long, is made like a spring coil and handles turns in any direction well.
I decided to start by snaking the underground pipe. Basically, I wanted to avoid climbing up a ladder to the gutter if the underground pipe obviously showed a problem. My long flat snake had no problems going through the pipe. Once the end of the snake protruded out of the daylight end of the pipe, I tied a branch the snake and pulled the branch back through the pipe with the snake. The branch had no difficulty running through the pipe and did not appear to have seen much wear and tear from the process. I concluded that the underground pipe was fine.
Since the underground pipe didn't appear to be the problem, I now had the unpleasant task of climbing up an extension ladder to check out the gutter. I put the ladder beside the downspout and climbed to the top. When I reached my hand into the gutter, (my ladder is too short so I couldn't see inside the gutter), I found a chunk of debris covering the downspout. Bingo! Upon recollection, I remembered that I had not been able to entirely clean the 2 foot section of gutter between the end of the gutter and downspout because I couldn't reach that section while standing on my short ladder. Apparently some debris on that end of the gutter had clogged the entry to the downspout.
I unclogged the downspout. Then I ran my spring coil 25' snake down the downspout just to make sure the downspout was clear. I didn't notice any observable blockages in the downspout. Next I moved my ladder a couple times and spot checked the gutter to for debris and didn't find appreciable debris in the gutter.
I also used a level to check the level of the gutter. The gutter is basically level without much slope at all. Unfortunately, the section of gutter above the ladder shown in the
picture slopes the wrong direction. The end effect is when the water overflows the gutter, the most significant overflow occurs where the gutter butts up against house. I'm concerned that the splashing water might be getting the framing for the eave wet.
I think the primary problem we had was the clogged downspout. This evening we had a fairly heavy rain that did not overflow the gutter. This rain was not as heavy as what we had seen before though so the result does not guarantee the problem is solved. Regardless, we need to get the slope of the gutter fixed so that the downspout end of the gutter is lower than the opposite end.
